


Somewhere You Cannot See

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: F/M, Grieving, Infidelity, Loss, Post-Endless Waltz, Regret, Reminiscence, Self-Loathing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-29 04:23:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11433084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: Even when domestication takes, wild beasts are still beasts.Beasts still mourn their dead.





	Somewhere You Cannot See

He'd never noticed the portrait before. Maybe it had never been there before; maybe it was just one of those details that could be stamped with the word _trivial_. He'd come to understand that there wasn't enough space in any mind for everything; not enough for the obsessive hoarder's fanaticism for those tiny vagaries. He'd lived his life as reality's librarian, assiduously cataloguing everything, no matter how banal. The old man's hand had cracked on his cheek, or a fist socked hard with a rush of breath in his gut, if he didn't answer the prompts: _What color and type of hat was the woman third from the left on the bus wearing, boy?_

A half-second to answer. Even asking, _Was someone even wearing a hat?_ meant he hadn't been paying the requisite attention. There'd be a hard snap somewhere. So he'd begun to assimilate those details without even conscious attention. Things were always forgotten in the churn, of course. Even his name meant less than how many magazines that gendarme had in his webbing. Priorities couldn't exactly be kept.

Because the old man was ultimately right. Survival was a paradox. If you really wanted to live, then you could only think about that, and not what you were keeping alive. If you really wanted to persevere over what would kill anyone and everyone else, then _you_ needed to be forgotten. Not just those superficial little niceties. Not just your conscience. Not only your compassion. Not merely your humanity. Your name needed to go, because attachment was something their hands and designs could find purchase on like Velcro. Your friends? You didn't have friends. Friends could be the dagger twisted with a hard rasp on your spine; friends could be the squelch of wet meat under treacherous hands; friends could be the bullet you never heard against the nape of the neck.

Or friends meant you answered when someone called, when you knew that phone shouldn't be touched. Friends meant you'd step through a doorway that silhouetted you for a figure hunched behind a rifle cradling you in its crosshairs or its sight's black wedge.

Lovers, too. But the old man was wrong about something. Wars eventually ended. Wasn't the old man wrong about that? A war had taken the old man's life. Not even because he'd failed his own test. It wasn't out of friendship or love or any of the fallibility that he found himself sprawled out, wheezing a last few breaths, a palm clasped on his gut. The old man refused to flinch, to wince. He just struggled for sips of air that frothed in his chest, shoved against his organs, bruised him while he drowned in his own lungs.

Blood didn't even have the dignity to puddle around him. He just flopped out while the one-fifty-fives cracked on in their slow mechanical rhythm, _boom-screech-clang-clong-ready-load-fahr-boom_. The old man didn't smile. There was no revelation; there were no words from The Other Side. The old man had stared down at other boys and girls and men and women that suddenly felt their eyes alighting on something in mortality's cold gleam and shook his head over it.

_Boy, there's no heaven, and there's no hell. What there is, boy, is hypoxia. They're seein' their family and friends and mom and dad because their brains are starting to go. There's no god, and there's no devil, either. Do you know what there is? Nothin'._

He knew. The old man shoved his own sidearm into the man's hand when it still only belonged to a boy. Grunted out one simple command, _Kill 'em so they don't suffer too much. Only bad thing about war is needless suffering._

The man, when he was a boy, had learned not to ask the old man about whether they could be saved. That wasn't the point. So the man as a boy stretched out his hand, felt the webbing and vest on his shoulders, stared down the sight's notch and leveled it over someone's face.

_No double-taps; don't waste ammo._

The man as a boy didn't waste ammo. No, sir. A flat crack. Pistols were always so _loud_. But it wasn't something romantic or poetic. It was because the barrel was so much shorter than a rifle's, even with the smaller cartridge. A hard jerk of a backstrap against the web of the boy's palm between trigger finger and thumb.

Then they were dead. A tulip of blood and brain and meat and scalp and white bone always stabbed out like someone pushing their finger through wet tissue paper.

When the boy was older, when the old man was heaving on the dirt, the man who was then a boy just hunched there and sat beside the old man. The man who was a boy wondered if maybe the old man would be an apostate in his last moments. That he'd surrender some kernel of equivocation, spit up just the tiniest sough of doubt like a deathbed conversion.

But the old man didn't. He just lay there, an ugly pink froth burbling up from his lips, guts like kiddie plastic bloating out of his gut, the armor and webbing pulled away to assay the wound. Lethal. Nothing could be done for him. Not with the quarter-kilo of shrapnel that a frag shell had hammered into his sternum.

It occurred to the man who was a boy then to ask the old man for some parting words, for advice, for _something_. Even to beg his permission to stop all of this. But he didn't. For a flicker of a second, it even seemed perfectly appropriate to lace his fingers with the old man's, to hold him. Just so he'd know he wasn't really alone when his sight went.

That was a regret. Regrets weren't those meaningless sandy handfuls of detail that could be let slip from your memory when there was a need to tuck something else onto the shelves. They tattooed themselves behind your eyes; they boiled hot and urgent through thoughts that inconveniently minced through minefields of memories. You'd cavort giddily through bucolic acres of innocuous musings and then you'd stumble over one like any of the tens of thousands of the wretched farmers and travelers and children that resurrected half-forgotten wars for a leg-splintering instant. Mud and trench horror; cold gray shower rooms flooded with gas; screeching treads and the mayhem in tens of millions of men and women hurled against each other, each merrily marching with a bayonet in their back into the chasm between them, eager to fill the pit first and roar into their enemies' dead lands.

How many wars had there been, anyway? Or maybe it was better just to ask how many peaces there really had been. How many times had they set down their rifles only because they needed to replace them; how many times had they shrugged off swords to snatch up guns, or toss their guns for tanks? And when did the mobile suit arrive, man as machine, humanity's ultimate evolution? Memories. History.

But he didn't remember the portrait on the wall. It looked like no one he'd ever seen. That was for damn sure. Stern, arch. Prussian. Not only a mustache but mustaches. Luxuriant and lushly waxed. The stiff brush strokes defined with the hard economy for emotion he could feel from the figure scowling down at him. Hair like iron and a stark gray uniform. A gloved hand set on a sword's pommel, scabbarded only for the aesthetic. It dripped blood. The man wasn't only a dilettante noble. He recognized the expression in the eyes. His own.

He'd never seen it before because she'd only lately put up the damn thing. She hated it. The old man stared down at her from her family's mantelpiece, took pride of place. It was one of a set; the scowling old Prussian aristocrat and his wife. Freiherr Wilhelm Konstantin von Raumer. And wife. She didn't even have a name; she was pushed into the cold black earth beneath his severe monument under _und Frau_.

Von Raumer's Frau was one of her distant antecedents. A great-great-great-something-grandmother whose body was a vessel for his offspring. They would become soldiers. This was a wisdom conferred to her while she stared up at her parents' textureless silhouettes in her crèche while they roared at her wet nurse that the bitch had been far too lenient with their girl. Do you want to turn her into a coward?! When she cries for milk, ignore her. Don't cosset her. She needs nourishment; she has no need for a shoulder or a kind word or petting. She isn't a puppy.

Her father's palm on her shoulder, shoving her down onto the lavish scarlet carpet that poured out like blood from a broken body. It gushed around a great hearth that roared with a spattering inferno, cast out sparks on her face.

_More. A soldier cannot afford to be physically **or** mentally weak. Finish your push ups, and then go back to your assignments. And then come back for more push ups. And sit ups. You should be reading while you exercise._

Yes, sir.

 _Erich und seine Frau_. At least her mother had a name. Angela. Harder than even her father. The bitch was upright, rigid, perpetually at attention. A uniform fetish or just a bliss for that officious sartorial power. Even when just pushing around the help.

They both wore glasses. It was something inevitable that their daughter also would. A cold glare of wide circular lenses. Even if hers became the usual BC spectacles when they tossed her into the officer's academy. Grunting sweating ordeal. Not even an expectation but only a sharp certainty their daughter should always be First. First in marksmanship. In academia. In fitness. And she was. She was, because there could be nothing else but that. There were no other possibilities.

War was inevitable. War was good. War was right. War was the ineluctable product of a human will for its own annihilation. Humanity's most righteous reflection was found in a pool of blood. Peace meant stagnation. Peace was the depression in the perfect economic cycle of war.

 _War is an expression of the energy and self-respect which a nation possesses. Perpetual peace means perpetual death._ They would have lasered it onto her skin if tattoos were not tacky and undignified.

She felt his presence. A black aura creeping over her. She'd felt it in the past. So many times. Fingers laced together on her lap, half-draped with a nightgown she'd shrugged into and forgotten she was even wearing. It was prosaic. Bland white cotton, settling delicately over pallid skin. An unremarkable half-nakedness. Bare legs tangled in the bedding.

He said nothing at all. Stood there at the door's threshold. Her daughter's voice wasn't there; no whisper of the clattering, the clamor, the simple house-filling humanity in her vitality. There wasn't a need for the wheelchair now. She walked; ran; cavorted. The surgery's ordeal, the prolonged teeth-gritting convalescence, even... Even a terrifying hard bark ricocheting in her mother's voice when the girl was pouting, whimpering with the pain, _I don't want to do it anymore. I'll just use my wheelchair again._

No! Don't be weak! Get on your feet and walk! Do it! Do it! Now!

Marie hadn't spoken to her for two days after that. But she walked.

She hated that portrait, so she hung it over her mattress' spacious sprawl. The acreages of cushioned fabric and bedding that was so needlessly luxurious. They had told her war was eternal. War demanded austerity. But now there was no war. She had a daughter whose spine sometimes still gnawed at her; whose voice still pealed through the house and ruptured three-in-the-morning darkness when the woman was drifting through what she would tell you, if you asked her, ordered her, to identify what civilians least understand about the experience of war.

No one has nightmares during war. No one even dreams of home. No one dreams at all. Sleep is a black featureless interval between wakefulness. She'd never bothered asking neurologists, head-shrinkers, anyone else about it. It was just something that happened.

The dreams would bide like any guerrilla, lurking in ambush until there was no defense at all. And then they'd strike. The blood and bullet rain. The simpleminded horror, huddled in a foxhole or even entombed in a cockpit while the artillery hammered dirt into sticky clay mulch. The fighter-bombers rushing over the deck. Tasting the awesome industrial power concentrated on the act of massacre. The powerlessness in being a prisoner in your own body while someone else, someone younger, maybe terrified or maybe just hardened and callous, pulled a trigger.

Nightmares were rarely of death. Even now. Unless you saw yourself stalking through the door. Your younger face. A grim smile that was more a rictus tugged at their lips. They were rangier, harder. Femininity melted off with battle's toil. Ragged. Filthy battledress matted with mud and dusted with the hard white crust weeks' sweat became.

You reek; you're squalid from shitting in a ration bag from the bad water that no amount of purification tabs can remedy. Because everything regresses in war. Bombs splinter the treatment plants and sewage runs grumose and black through streets and alleys and children learn to play and cavort in the ditches if they had ever known what they called modernity.

The colonies glittered in their unseen constellations overhead, and she saw children without vaccinations, without shoes, stomping red dust while they rejoiced with something as simple as a bit of candy from the humanitarian rations they'd throw around as a simple _sorry_ for dumping fifty tons of ordnance on their shitty little villages that didn't even feature on maps.

The woman _then_ hated them. Hair drawn back in a tight severe bun that came unraveled; staring from behind a cold pair of glasses. They were her BC specs, of course. Not her ordinary frames. And she loathed all of them. She felt an ugly visceral pang of revulsion that anyone so pathetic should exist. Sleepy fishing villages so poor they built manors out of their army's discarded ration bins and plywood and plastic and rusting metal. So fetid with rotting stale fish or unrefrigerated meat and the wads of blackened chicken blood swarming with flies that even hardened grunts could retch.

That woman would stalk out of the jungle or the desert or from wherever again, and she'd be cradling a scuffed and scarred pistol in her right hand, and she'd clamp her left on the door frame. And she'd ask you, _Do you want to die first, or should I give you a chance to watch the kiddie go and say a little prayer for her?_

And then you'd remember staring through her eyes. The easy languor when you pulled the trigger. The man standing behind her understood. Because he'd learned that you can hammer your brain into obedience when you're awake. But not when sleep drapes its cowl over you. It wasn't that dreams smothered you: They let you breathe again. Discipline and control bled off at rest.

The woman couldn't even remember the first person she'd killed. It was remarkable, wasn't it? Somehow, by varying degrees of denial, the bulk of humans believed they managed to live their lives without actually killing anyone or anything. She'd learned to laugh at them; at the childish hypocrisy in their rote protests' opacity. Their willingness to delude themselves that they had some unique moral innocence because they'd never personally tugged back a trigger or slid a finger around a mobile suit's control yoke and reduced an apartment block to a rubble crematorium.

They thrived on war. They ate war's produce. Just like the animal-lovers who fed their dogs better than their servants and then gorged on the abattoir's wares. Or the sanctimonious vegetarians who feasted on the productivity in slaves' dutiful fingers stitching together their designer clothes or soldering their trendy electronics for less than they were being charged for dwelling in their industrial ghettos.

But somehow, most still managed to avoid the _act_ of killing. Most managed to persuade themselves that killing really _was_ a sin, some archetypal ultimate transgression. Somehow, Cain kept cracking that stone on Abel's head in the hot primordial sunset; somehow, he kept his brother in mortal ruin, kept alive that taboo. And kept alive that possibility, also; stewarded the simple need to slaughter your brother or your sister for God's love. And she had so many times she couldn't quite remember the first at all.

“What do you want?” That was a question that could be asked so many ways, in so many voices. Sincere, noncommittal.

Facing humanity as a selection of replaceable parts on a service assembly-line. She'd stood in a queue and blinked at the unreal sight of one of her training platoon's talents, a woman who could nail a two-foot target with the Leo's one-oh-five from seven kilometers, well outside the stated accurate sensor range, asking that question. She was older; so much older. Peering down at a child like any of those they'd insouciantly wasted; the little boy with his mother and father. There wasn't a smile.

Just a question. Mechanical. _What do you want?_ In a trite commercial café with about ten million outlets everywhere in the earth sphere. Still in uniform. This one was even better camouflage than their battledress. No one would've known her from Eve. Short-cropped black hair and an unremarkable face and a pair of silver earrings and modest makeup and a gray apron draped over her chest.

Or you could ask it in aggravation. _What the **hell** do you want, huh?! Whaddaya want?! _

Or it could even be sweet, dripping syrupy affection. It... It was one of those memories that never even had happened. Something that she _should_ have been allowed to remember. Ruffling a room service menu and cooing it at him, hair spilling auburn over her shoulders, or maybe puddling on her naked breast, her skin haloed with sun through a wide opened window.

_What do you want, darling?_

But this was like none of them. This was a question asked to the window whose slatted shutters admitted none of the day's light. This was a question you asked because you needed to admit that someone had been standing behind you for a good five minutes without a word from you; because you'd passed well beyond simple _hello_ s and even _what are you doing here_ s.

He kept standing there. What she'd said hadn't been enough to dispel him like a night terror retreating away from its gossamer reality back into something barely remembered but its clinging evil impressions. Maybe that's exactly what he was.

A bad dream that wouldn't melt off with the morning slashing through your windows. A living nightmare. The woman's arms drew around her knees, pulled them up against her chest. She hadn't sat like that since she was a child. But childhood was flooding back into her.

Not an innocent idle ease. Not some idyllic Prussian pastoral. Because the family's estate should have been something beautiful, but it was stark and ashen in every memory. Her tutors' steely discipline. The alienation and loneliness in the one nearest to her age being a beautiful twentysomething maid her father rutted with, selfishly grunting like a wild pig.

It was easy to say she needed to grow up faster; it was also wrong. Childhood wasn't an experience. It was an epoch, an interval of time. Her only reprieve was the night, when she'd huddle like that on her bed and stare out the window at the foliage outside its vast pane and savor its slow rustle, moving slowly in the summer breezes and a peeled-bare creeping shadow across her walls in the winter.

But it was only fair that he should be a deathless nightmare. She was one, too. They all were. They didn't belong here.

“I heard that Marie's worried about you.” His voice was something strange. Not because she hadn't grown accustomed to hearing it. It was because she had. They'd been enemies; not even the more pedestrian kind, incidentally staring at each other from across meaningless borders politicians had penciled in and then told their soldiers were destined to be immutable, changeless. Until the time came for them to become allies, and for other allies to be enemies.

They'd been implacable in their mutual hatred. A war of extermination. Her entire life had been consecrated to his death; to his allies' deaths, of course, also. But his death more than any others. She'd read the dossiers. _Perfect_. But she was perfect, too.

And now he was standing there. Heavily corded veins rippled along sinewy arms; a broad chest strained through a tee-shirt whose sleeves distended with enormous biceps. Long legs poured into jeans. Stockinged feet on her bedroom's carpet. His hair was still a confusion of brunet spines. The face was still something she could've fitted into what he had been then. The bones were firmer, the proportions more securely set. He was taller. More adult.

Not enough time had passed for him really to be _old_. Just older. She was, too.

The man's arms wound over his chest.

“Is she?” It was how most of their conversations started. The truth was that neither really liked to speak. They could. She could, especially. Oration was one of her talents. An officer's obligation; not only silver-tongued but grandiloquent when the moment demanded it. And rough and hard-edged and crushing in language as militarized as any mobile suit.

“Yeah. She is.”

“She has no reason to worry.” The woman pulled her knees closer against her chest. Felt her breasts dimpled. They were larger than they'd been. She'd grown... Soft. Softer, anyway. Wearing a suit, and not a uniform.

“She said you haven't been eating. She said-”

“She's clearly mistaken.”

“She said you're going to bed at seven-thirty at night after she's done with dinner. You come home, make her supper-”

“So I've been tired. Maybe I'm sick.” The woman was. Of many things. “Thank you for coming to look in on me. You can see I'm fine-”

“You're sitting on your bed at one-thirty on a Saturday afternoon and staring at the wall.”

“Some people knit. Some people take nature hikes. It's a free world, remember? How is Her Highness? Guaranteeing the rights of even her unworthiest citizens with her great and sage administration?” It was childish. She knew it was. Sneering at a woman five years younger than she was who'd shouldered a burden that would crush even a thousand people under its weight, much less one.

It wasn't fair to him, either. The man didn't wince. Didn't smile, either.

“Yeah. She is.” He stepped into her room. Didn't just linger at the threshold. It was beautiful. Light seeped in from the doorway, caught the huge antique dresser's craggy edges, glinted on the lavishly varnished hardwood, skipped like a stone across a still pond on the vast mirror. Her mattress was flanked with a pair of bed stands like menacing wooden sentinels. A clock winked the time in phosphorescent figures from one of them.

A gold-trimmed frame sat on the other, turned pointedly away to face the wall. He'd seen it more than once. Gilt roses were filigreed around the boundaries.

“It sounds exhausting to be her.”

“It sounds exhausting to take care of a seventeen-year-old when you're not even taking the time to feed yourself.”

“I eat.”

“She said you're not-”

“She seems to be saying a lot. And who's telling you all of this?”

“Her uncle-”

“Which one?” There were six of them, after all.

“Does it really matter?”

“Someone wants to stay popular. Keep a seventeen-year-old's confidences. What? Did she swear them to secrecy?” That sharp _bitchiness_ was something she hadn't indulged for years, either. It came out false, about as natural as a fifty-year-old housewife slipping into her old school clothes. “Never mind.”

“Quatre-”

“It figures. He's too soft-hearted; he was too soft-hearted then. The hypocrite. Does he know how many people he killed, Heero?” She thought it was a ridiculous name. Not only as a living vestal fire for a dead ideal. Delete an _E_ from it, and that's what he was. It was just too on-the-nose. Too... Too _perfect_. “Sometimes, when I look at him agonizing over irrigation projects, balancing the needs of selfish stupid people who won't stop breeding with the welfare of all the fish and the antelopes and trees, I want to take him by the lapels and ask him, How much did you ruin? How many lives did you destroy?”

“But you don't. Because he wouldn't get angry at you. He'd stop and think about it and it would drive him crazy, Lady.” Their names felt almost perfunctory.

Only _this_ man dared to call her that. Unadorned with any formal titles. Even the President of The World, what a notion, called her _Commander_. Sometimes even her old _Colonel_. Because that was still her rank; symbolically the highest. The world had no need for wars, had no need for an army. And only armies needed generals.

They were glorified police.

“Are we finished?”

“No. I don't think so.” What the hell did he want?

“I'm sorry. I think you misheard that as a question because you heard a bit of punctuation in my voice. We are finished-”

“Is this because of the memorial?” What a moronic question that was. Because the answer was obvious: Of course it is. And because it had nothing to do with something so _simple_. It was like asking if you were dying because of the bullet. You were. The bullet was the seed. But the bullet alone was just a piece of metal. It was what it was doing to your body that was killing you.

Heero still stood well away from the bed. And Une had little interest in admitting that he was there. So she drew in a long slow breath and embraced another bit of perfect beautiful silence. Her glasses lay on the bed stand beside the picture frame, beside the ribbons that time had faded. They stared up at her, a blanched pink.

He wasn't leaving.

“We're still violent people, aren't we, Heero?” Une's voice was almost conversational now. Aspired to perfect nonchalance with a needling edge of allegation. It only came out brittle and husky, like someone struggling to camouflage _just_ how close the tears were.

He didn't answer.

“Do you deny it?”

“No.” Heero wouldn't. He didn't have much of an enthusiasm for facile lies. “No one can change who they are. What we were, we are.”

“What we were, we are. I like that. Change is self-deception. You know, I thought I could change. Once. I was so... So _excited_ about peace. About _Peace_. Big bold-lettered _**Peace**_.” Une's voice was stamped with a rueful glint of a smile that never reached her lips. “But I was lying to myself about that. Do you miss it?”

“Miss what?” He knew what she'd meant. Of course he did.

“Don't lie. Don't insult me with that play-pretend innocence you mouth to your little Empress. President.”

“Yes. I miss it.” He could tell Une that. And probably Trowa. And Wufei and he never needed to talk. They saw each other at the annual VW fête, Victory over War, what a conceit, and they'd grace each other with a quick nod before Wufei slumped back at some banquet table's seat and drank himself serenely into mute numbness and Heero was forced to entertain the preening dignitaries at Her Majesty's side. Because it wouldn't be fair to abandon her to their glad-handing inanity when he could posture and be her herculean evidence.

The evolutionary experiment. The perfected warrior who'd become pacifism's evangelist. He was a case study. He was a murderholic who was comfortably on the wagon, more than ten years sober. And if _he_ could be, if he'd never tasted brimstone on his tongue again, then everyone else had a shot at it. So to speak.

But it was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Just like every alcoholic either still was an alcoholic or never really was.

“Do you remember your first kill, Heero?” It wasn't the strangest question she'd ever asked him.

“Excuse me-”

“You heard what I said.” It was unreal not to see her face. She was a black silhouette against white shutters that took on an unearthly glow with the wan light. Auburn hair pooled on lean shoulders, spilled over her spine, puddled on the mattress around her. She'd never trimmed it.

“Yes. I do.” That was one of those moments that couldn't just be cast off.

“I can't right now. Isn't that something that should be so important it's indelibly imprinted on your soul? Who was yours?”

“I didn't know their name. Just an anonymous kill. Two people, actually. In a gun pit.”

“Tell me about it, Heero.”

“They're dead. What's there to tell?”

“Tell me.”

“What does this have to do with you not eating, with you frightening your seventeen-year-old daughter with how moody and aloof you've gotten?” Moody, huh?

“Tell me about it, Heero. I'm still your CO.”

“You're not in your uniform. We're not at the office.”

“Fine. I'm still an old war buddy, Heero.”

“We were on opposite sides.”

“Is there any deeper camaraderie than between people who know what it means to stare into each other's eyes with a sincere will to kill one another?” It sounded like something _he_ would say, didn't it? The words felt mealy and strange on her tongue. They were so romantic. So drenched in chivalry that had never even lived, but whose memory was buried with courtly love.

“I hated you.”

“I hated you, too, Heero. Sometimes, to tell you the truth? I still hate you. I still think about how much different everything would have been if that self-destruct had actually _taken_ your life instead of blasting bits of that accursed machine all over the snow.”

“You blame us-”

“Of course. But the past is the past, isn't it?” Heero just stood there. Five minutes. Ten. She wasn't going to talk.

“It was near a forest clearing. On earth; not a colony.” Heero finally spoke with memory's lonely voice. “Near the Congo River. I flanked a gun pit. There were two boys in it, manning an MG. One of them had an old Kalashnikov rifle, and I put two quick bullets into each of them. They were dead before they hit the dirt.

“I was filled with so much adrenaline I don't even remember shooting them. I remember coming up around the pit. I remember seeing them both turning around. And then I remember them sprawling out. And then I remember thinking how easy it really was.

“I was nervous. Like Marie is before she dances. She told me, before her first recital?” It was miraculous, wasn't it? A paraplegic ballerina. “She told me that she was so anxious about it, and then she went into some... Some tranquil place, and when she came out, she didn't even believe she'd done anything. It was so easy.”

“That's because it is.” Une laughed. It was an ugly and ragged laugh. “That's the kind of people we are. It's so easy to kill. It's even fun sometimes.”

“You're right.” He'd never told anyone else that. Because, with Trowa, with Wufei, well, there was just that intuitive understanding. Trowa was probably a sociopath; taking a life was like blinking for him. Wufei was just nuts. They killed because it was something they did for various reasons that needed no apology. But it had an explication. Heero had never met anyone else but Une who killed because it was fun.

“I'm trying to remember if my first kill was with an MS or during our first infantry engagement. They used us like dismounted infantry when our MSs couldn't fight very well. I know it's something you'd barely believe, not having something with all the power of god under your fingers.” So she laughed again. “No. I take that back. The first person I killed was back in Prussia.” How could she have forgotten that?

“My parents' estate. Someone had stolen from my father. He was one of the Zodiac's military advisors. If they knew that someone had made off with that disc, his career would have been finished. They were going to die, anyway.

“It's been so long. I can't believe I forgot about that.” She had forgotten. It hit her so suddenly again. “I was eight years old, I think. Seven or eight. My father. His name was Erich. He pushed the gun in my hand and said, A soldier kills without thinking. A soldier obeys orders.”

“That's what the old man taught me.” Heero wasn't so much contributing his half of a conversation as just offering a statement of fact.

“He was so pathetic. This sniveling little rat of a man. I remember that he always looked at my mother with so much _lust_ in his eyes. I think she might have slept with him to get back at my father. They did that. He'd fuck the maid; she'd screw the gardener. Maybe they kept accounts of who owed whom another humiliation.

“But I wasn't very frightened. He looked like a stupid animal.” A rodent's face; buck teeth and a weedy wiry compactness. Short. “I shot him in the face. I was so startled from the shot I dropped the gun. There wasn't very much blood. It was strange.” Une felt it again. She was suddenly her adult self cradling the eight-year-old girl in her arms and guiding the pistol up, up, up from the low-ready that had become muscle memory.

Tugged the trigger with her and felt its steely heft recoil against her palm.

The man's brow dimpled; a fine black point. A wash of red vomited across the estate's brick wall behind him. An archetypal firing squad. Of one eight-year-old girl.

“Do you think he remembered everyone whose life he took?” Heero had no need to ask who _he_ was. That man's shadow cowled her at every instant. He was at the head of an army of phantoms marching eternally in the dust beside her. “I think he would, Heero. Don't you?”

“It sounds like him. Yeah.” It wasn't possible to smooth his voice perfectly over that. Heero didn't only feel the man's presence. He was an apparition; he could be seen, lurking there, a hand forever just an _inch_ from the woman's shoulder.

It was like the old man for him. But Heero had never loved the old man. Had never kept himself alive every day with fantasies of something that could have been, that might have been, that should have been.

“You know, he told me once. Before...” Heero heard her eyes close. Her voice hitch in her chest. “Before he boarded that ridiculous machine the last time.” Words grew thicker. “That he knew exactly how many people had died in the wars _we_ fought before that moment. And I believed him. Because we had an entire logistics department. They handled graves registration. Most of them were empty.

“The caskets came home lighter than air.” What can you bring back when someone's scattered like stardust in those huge shoals of broken bodies and shards of shattered machines? “Their families needed to bury ghosts. They needed to mourn bitter memories.” Like she did. He never came back, either. There was nothing but debris. The man asked for no grave. No ceremony. And it was her onus to obey his every word. No matter what it meant to her.

“How many did _you_ people kill, anyway? But you were the heroes. You were the good ones, right, in that war? That war that was fought for what, Heero?” Une still refused even to glance over her shoulder. But her fingers shuddered on her knees. “For a foregone conclusion? What was the difference? In the end, there was still just...” What was it?

“Peace, Heero. That's what it was. What Zodiac wanted; what the United Earth Government wanted. What this- this brave new world wants. Peace. But do you know what it is? Do you understand what it _**really**_ is? It's an absence of violence. Peace is a word. You can no more immunize humanity to war than you can keep water from flowing downhill. You keep the will alive. You have governments. You have institutions.

“Nothing keeps us from being _us_ , Heero. What is the idea with this thing everyone wants so _deeply_ to believe is peace? We'll evolve in it? We'll be peaceful for so long that the idea of picking up a rock or a gun or building a war machine will be as alien as sleeping in furs under the stars?” Heero said nothing for another few minutes.

“That's all very philosophical. But that has nothing to do with us. With you. And you know it, Lady-”

“Fuck you.” That was very adult. “I'm sorry. That was...”

“Honest.”

“Yes. But not very polite. When I last spoke to him, you know, we spoke about the number of people the latest war had taken. It was an incomplete count. Everyone knows war is more about killing people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, who can't escape. Maybe his vision of war was nobler than mine.

“Maybe he really believed in the possibility of the mobile suit being a new era of knighthood, where armored warriors fought other warriors. But he... He wasn't a realist, Heero. Idealists never are. They're not people like us. They've never stood in the mud and felt numb inside because you don't see the difference between shooting one person and carpet-bombing an entire city anymore.

“I think he loved the idea of war _having_ its constant native horror. Bringing enough violence to soldiers that they would become emissaries of the battlefield's real wisdom, its real lessons. But the more I think about what he thought, the more unworkable it sounds.

“We were all in his thrall. He had so much charisma. He was so beautiful. He was a great leader, like the President.” There was no quirk of a smile in it. “He had the power not- not just to lead in the present, but make people imagine the future. But he forgot something, Heero.”

“What was that?”

“People don't live in the present, or the future. They live in the past. They don't forget the pain they've felt. Their grievances. People still inhabit an anguish they've never even known, but feel. They speak of the sins of fathers and mothers, but it's grandfathers and grandmothers. Great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Both of us know what really needs to be done for the President's great vision.

“We keep seeing it. People with empty places in their chests where their souls used to be, who can't think about anything more than avenging what happened. Old soldiers in old armies who remember how they used to have meaning; who don't have meaning anymore. Widows and widowers and kids without mothers and fathers.” Was she a widow? “You came out of this war incredibly whole, all things considered.”

Heero would never argue otherwise.

“But the war took something more precious than another person from us. It took _us_ away. I know the way people look at me, Heero. Even the way Marie looks at me sometimes. Like a living time capsule. They're afraid of us. We're obsolete.

“We're an ugly memory. We're an embarrassment. We're like land mines, like old bombs. Ready to go off at any second. I know why Wufei quit; why he just lives in exile. The temptation's too great. We have weapons. We have training. We have expertise.

“You can demobilize people like us. Disarm us. But we stay live. You've kept well, in excellent shape. Is it only because you're a policeman?”

“No.”

“It's not only because she likes it when a living statue fucks her.”

“No.”

“We really are an embarrassment, aren't we? It's why they treat us with so much ostentatious deference. So they can persuade themselves we're what we pretend to be, hoping we'll be happy enough not to go off. They'd be much happier if they could blow us up or dismantle us or send us rocketing into the sun like the old mobile weapons.” He knew they would be. “There are so many of us. Too many of us.

“But I know that most aren't like us at all. They're happy to just be over it. To get on with their lives.” But the truth was that people like Une, like Heero, _didn't_ have lives to get on with at all. “He left, Heero. He left, and he didn't come back. When I was comatose, I wasn't really asleep. I stayed awake.

“It was terrifying. I kept sane only thinking about him. I tried to reconcile with him. How much I felt he'd hurt me. How much I felt he'd betrayed me. He'd... He'd thrown me away. It was worse than anything I'd ever had to taste. That sort of humiliation. I gave _everything_ to him. I pushed myself to fight for him. For his ideals.

“But then I was an embarrassment. Just like now. I know how your wife looks at me, Heero. Like an embarrassment. I _am_ an embarrassment. It's a fraud, having a mass-murderer as the new Nation's chief policewoman. What do people think when they see me on television, or at conferences? Someone who ordered how many tens of millions of ruined lives speaking about justice and peace? How can anyone believe you can really reinvent yourself into a new reality? And why?”

“For someone who didn't want to talk, you're doing a lot of it.”

“You're right. You're right.” So Une laughed. Laughed because it really _was_ funny. Fabulously funny. “It's all a farce. What is it they say? First as tragedy, then as travesty? What's the ten-millionth time, Heero? How much bathos is there in having had so many crimes committed by so many people that punishment becomes totally impossible?

“Is it really peace if you need to live tranquilly next door to the person that killed your husband, your wife, your children? Do you choose to live and let live, or just live for revenge? I think about it. In the country where I was raised. It belonged to the Prussians. And then after an unforgivable crime, to another country called Poland. And then it became Prussia again.

“After that war, what would you even _say_ to someone who'd worked in one of the factories that produced dead bodies like no other time in history? Are there some crimes so great there are no punishments for them?” Was that war? Their war, or any war? “We got off free. Both of us, Heero. Both of us, you son of a bitch.

“Both of us never even got a chance for a reckoning for what we'd done! They act like it was a favor to us! They act like it was something for _us_ that we're allowed to live in this peaceful world without even paying a price at all!” She turned. Finally. And her eyes _were_ brilliant with tears. They weren't kind tears. They weren't sweet and gentle tears.

They were as bitter as the poison in her blood. If you kissed her heart, you would die from it.

The tears came as a cold glare in dark-chocolate eyes that were still big, still almost girlish. Set in a sharply defined and beautiful face whose brows were high and firm, whose lips were still soft like rose petals and cruel in their twist. Silky auburn hair slumped down her shoulders.

The nightgown had come open around her chest; big creamy breasts swelled up. Her legs were bare; she was naked but for the bits of gauzy cotton, round thighs rising up to a dark vee between them.

“We didn't need to pay any price at all for what we did. How many innocent lives did we end? We didn't deserve him. We didn't deserve his ideals. Your wife is the heir to his ideals. She saw something that- that we _didn't_. That's what separates soldiers from idealists, Heero.

“They're delusional. They see hallucinations and they think they can make them the future. We live and think and see in reality. In sharp edges. In knives and guns and weapons and strategies. Sometimes they grace us with the- the _honor_ in serving their will. You with your wife; me with... With a dead man.

“He died. Think about it, Heero. Think about it. The only person you've ever loved, and you needed to _hear_ them die. Do you know what it felt like? Of course you don't. Of course you don't!” Une's voice came as a strangled scream; it was the one she couldn't let out when she clasped the headset to her ears. “I heard his breathing. I heard the cockpit glass break. I heard the metal groan and shatter and I heard a last word that had no meaning at all and then I heard a little screech and the squelch cut it off.

“I thought I would kill Wufei when I met him. But I didn't. Not because of his ideals but because it wouldn't mean anything but just another dead soldier.”

“What do you want me to say?” Heero stood closer to the bed. “What do you want me to say to you?”

“Do you really want to know?” She asked a sincere question; she expected a sincere answer. And got one.

“Yeah. I do, Lady. I really honestly do-”

“I want you to tell me that you'll stop coming to me like this. With all of these pretexts. These _very_ innocent public visits with _very_ ulterior motives. I want you to tell me you'll stop coming into my bedroom like you belong here, like this is _your_ home. I want you to tell me you'll stop stop lingering around Marie and me; you'll stop seeing me in restaurants' windows and inviting yourself in for just a drink that... That becomes two, or three, or four drinks.

“I want you to tell me you'll stop stop working so late when I'm in the office. I want you to tell me the goddamned truth. Why you're here. Is it because of what Marie told your bleeding-heart little hypocrite of a friend? My third-in-command? Is it that? Is it because you're worried about how Marie's being raised, being one of her uncles?”

Heero knew, ultimately, ultimately, that the old man really was right. Words were just words; friendships were nothing but incidental relationships built on biology, on chemical happenstance, on the vague impressions that stabbed at your brain and kept misting behind your eyes even when you closed them.

But the old man was dead. And his wisdom died like any other philosopher's when their cults shriveled up and their thoughts were jeered and laughed at. It didn't mean they were wrong. It just meant they were no longer right for humanity anymore.

Heero should have just shrugged it off. Should have felt absolutely nothing. And the visceral want _not_ to feel anything probably meant he'd grown less than his wife had persuaded herself he had. The simple craving for the gunmetal apathy that laced through him, that alloyed his skin and turned his bones to iron, that completely stilled his heart in that titanium womb. It fed him with a metal mother's indifference; it nourished him with deuterium blood and spoke in a cool comforting voice of vectors and degrees and delta-Vs and absolutes. It would never tell him that it loved him; it would never expect to hear it back. It would never murmur soft little sighs into his ear while its fingers laced around his shoulders, _I wish so much I could take a break from it all. When you come inside me, I pretend sometimes we have the time for children. That it's dangerous. It brings me off like you wouldn't_ _ **believe**_ _. I love you. Love you._

Only ZERO ever spoke to him. And ZERO only told him what he already knew. Just perfectly clarified without any of those inhibitions even the honestest deadest minds still had layered over their thoughts.

Heero should have just answered, I'm worried about you, about Marie. That would have been so damn simple.

“You're the only person I know who's like me, Lady.” The old man was right. Honesty was something that should be compartmentalized, contextualized. What was honest at that moment should only have been sincere at that instant. It shouldn't touch _you_.

It still touched him. He stared down at her; she stared back. Une's eyes were a bitter glint in the half-darkness.

“I'm like you?”

“Yes. You are. And I'm like you.”

“That's right.” She wouldn't lie to him. That was something fundamental about the people they were. They didn't tend to lie. They needed to _learn_ the politically correct lies, the congenial mendacity that kept alive civility, that preserved people's fragile hearts and souls.

Because the War to End All Wars and the Eternal Peace and everything else that ensued from it were just words. They weren't even as fragile as glass, as fissured crystal. They were gauzy plumes of hot air that people breathed in and out. They let themselves believe like someone on LSD let themselves believe there really _were_ fanged winged tangerines and you could taste the letter _F_ like chocolate milk.

It was a beautiful fiction. But people needed other people to live and breathe those figments with them. So Une bit back her cynicism. She smiled a flat and perfectly convivial smile and patted people's backs and learned to hold their hands and even summoned tears for them, with them. Those that needed to hear the words that were so infinitesimal beside what she'd need to say to atone for what she'd done that they meant nothing at all.

“That's right, Heero. We are alike. We've always been alike. It's why I hate you so much. Why I hate you so much more than even Wufei. Why I hate you more than Zechs. Why I hate you more than your wife.” Une refused to admit their President's name into the bedroom with them. It was almost superstitious. “I can't forget just how meaningless my life is when I'm around you. I can't forget what it means really to be obsolete.

“I can't forget that _I_ demobilized myself. That I dismantled myself; took myself offline. I tore off my arms and my legs and I ripped out every bullet and I've tried to tear out my fangs. I could have joined Barton's rebellion. It would have been so simple, Heero. And you could have, too.

“We could have taken it for ourselves. People who not only knew how to fight but who _only_ knew how to fight. The people who knew the only place for themselves was out there. On the battlefield. In a storm of blood and bullets and brimstone. We could have gone down fighting, you know, Heero.

“Because wars always end. They always end when the last person willing to fight and die for them dies.”

“The old man told me wars never really end. They just change shape; they just move. They're like one traveling show that just takes place on different stages with different actors. The languages aren't always the same, but the words are.”

“The old man was right, Heero. But now we're supposed to believe that it's all over. Show's over. If you committed your entire life to rehearsing for it, if you were the star of the show, too bad, right? I... I met one of my old training platoon members. She was a better shot than I was, but I was a better pilot.

“She was a warrant officer; I was a first lieutenant. She tested worse than I did, but I always thought she was smarter. She's serving coffee and crappy processed pastries in one of those commercial cafés you see on every street corner. I didn't know what to say.

“I was so embarrassed that I got out of line and just left. What should I say to her? _This is the price of peace_? _This is what it means to live in a world without war_? That she gets to stand around and be a human machine serving people's need for caffeinated instant gratification? Wouldn't you pick up a gun again if someone gave you the chance?

“Wouldn't you climb back in the cockpit?” This was venomous. Heero knew it was; like old addicts commiserating about just _how_ fucking incredible the needle's kiss was, just how delicious the junk had been while it teased its feathered fingers out into your blood. How it didn't really _numb_ you. That it became a whirling haze of liquid sex and nothing nothing _nothing_ was ever and could ever be better.

Heero couldn't resist it. And Une couldn't, either. It was a relief Marie wasn't home.

Heero knew she wasn't; knew she wouldn't be until the evening. Out with Uncle Quatre and Uncle Trowa, browsing through the acreages of clothing that would be _perfect_ for something that was maybe the apotheosis of every one of his wife's designs and ambitions. Not for the memorial. For her prom.

Heero had never finished school; he'd never even gone. Une had never known anything but tutors and the military academy's austere corridors, battlements sharply etched against a cold German sky. And Marie had friends. Could live; could legitimately live without knowing war as anything but a distant horror. It _was_ becoming an anachronism.

And her adoptive mother was, too. And her uncles.

“I spoke to Dorothy.” Her voice was a brick tossed through a silence that might have mended everything, or at least plastered over it. “Awhile ago. A few months ago.” Une noticed that Heero was drawing closer to the bed.

“How is she?”

“Cynical. She hates that she's starting to turn into a true believer about this peace. Because there hasn't been this amount of peace in the world's history.”

“So, she's starting to think this human kindness thing might really stick?”

“She's horrified. We grew up in the same kinds of families, Heero. She'd heard that War was God. Was the Darwinian force that honed humanity, that defined it. It was more humanitarian to fight, to turn cities to dust and burn people alive, than to let them live lives without the force that gives everything meaning.

“Peace was like turning off the lights in heaven and forcing people to dwell in darkness. No one likes learning that they were wrong.” Was Une wrong? Was Heero? Were their lives wasted, then? Was _his_ life wasted?

Une felt it in her gut. It was like swallowing a lead ingot.

“Dorothy even told me she'd kill herself if this peace thing really caught on. But she's very melodramatic. I think she'll still do it. She kept her pistol; she's just too theatrical to go out like that. She knows gunshot corpses aren't pretty. She'll drown herself. Or poison herself beautifully.

“She told me that she misses your wife. They evidently had some fun times together while she was playing Queen Relena, ministering to the faithful in her kingdom of heaven.” Heero laughed. Because he knew. He'd heard them while being her standing-tall toy soldier. Quatre had, also.

_Heero, you'll never believe it!_

“I know they did.”

“Not jealous?”

“Asking if I'm a hypocrite?” Yes, she was.

“Maybe.” But she was a hypocrite, too. Heero was much too close to the bed now for her comfort. She barely heard his steps, muffled on the carpeting. And she was much too close to him. Because she'd moved across the mattress, also. A sense of some irresistible magnetism.

His warmth; the heat that wafted off of her scalding skin. The faint perfume that misted her. She'd showered and brushed her teeth and hair and there was even an inkling of makeup dusted over her skin. And then she'd slipped back into her nightgown because there wasn't really any reason to get up.

Because there _was_ the memorial service. She'd been asked to address the faithful as a loyal convert. To give the keynote address. Her Majesty, President of The World, such a title, would be the centerpiece, of course. But they needed the credibility in someone who'd fought. And suffered. And who had the uniform and had heard the hard coordinated rhythm in the phalanxes who would click their heels at attention while she walked past.

More than anything, she was the emissary of an army of ghosts, half in their world, and half in this one, ready to lay down arms on peace's behalf. She was this new age's real legitimacy. Heero would be speaking, also, an envoy from the other side of the lines. They would be there together. She would wear her uniform. He'd have something a little more dignified than an undershirt and bicycle shorts.

But they would each be the military cult's high priests, there to set down their scepters, to announce their apostasy, to take communion at the birthplace of the peace cult. And try to pretend they meant it. Everyone needed to see it. Everyone needed to know it. There would be no truth and reconciliation. There would be no trials, and no vengeance. No accounting at all.

Maybe this was her punishment. Her sentence. Heero's fingers brushed the bedding with a soft rustle. And then one knee. And then a second. The mattress yielded under his weight. He'd grown taller. Taller than she was. Not as tall as _he_ was.

Heero's hands outstretched. They reached her shoulders in an instant that was long enough for her to tell him to stop, to brush them off, to ward him away. She didn't. She always hated these moments. Hated them because she couldn't control herself. Because he couldn't. Because she loved them.

Felt his chest under her fingers. The wild and still strangely serene quality in it. An animal's comfort in being in another animal's company. They were both heathens playing the faithful. They could worship their real gods alone here. In this room. She'd never been to his home.

He came here. His hands scalded her hips; brushed smoothly up under her nightgown. The familiarity in those shapes. Unblemished after the surgeries, after the scalpel's purifying ritual that was as much for her mind as her flesh. They even wanted her body to forget, so she forgot. But she couldn't with him; his hands washed away amnesia's perfections and set the scars back into order.

His fingers fanned out and then cinched hard around her hips. Heero's lips were like she remembered; like the times they'd fall together after the first few days stalking around each other, wolves of different packs scenting out one another. Snapping and kicking up their hackles and letting spit coil down their fangs.

And then rutting like animals. In the office's supply closet. Every possible cliché. His hand lunging quickly up her legs, over her stockings' rasping fabric; the other on the small of her back. They didn't even kiss. They fucked. Pushed up her skirt and tore open his slacks and lunged together. Wheeled and ricocheted in an avalanche of clattering pens and discs and paper washing around them in a cellulose hurricane and her heels skittering over accounting books. Finally stabbed himself inside; it felt like she was being bayoneted. She was a born-again virgin, hadn't been touched for years and years. A hot flash inside her. And then they were done.

Smoothed their clothes back down and said, Well, that was strange, that was strange, but that's that. Tension or annoyance, but we've worked it out, right?

“I hate you.” Kissing him. Kissing those cruel lips. His lips really were. They weren't lips made naturally to smile. His smiles profaned the very idea. It was like watching a tiger smile; like seeing a lion grin. It meant nothing at all. It was the shape that someone could impute the idea to, and nothing more.

His lips burned at hers. A hot snap of napalm. They poured together so smoothly, so easily. Heero savored Une's mouth. Always. It wasn't that he'd never had other women before Une, before his wife, but this was the most incredible. The most candid. Because she had no self-consciousness at all. He'd fucked other women. Roughly. Ferociously.

His wife loved his coarse hands on her skin, pulling, tugging, tearing. Even lacing up through her hair and pulling until her eyes boiled with tears and a hot screech spilled out of her lips. But it was nothing like this. Nothing as _bestial_ as this.

He could cradle Une for hours and there would be an animal intensity in it that everything else lacked. He kissed her, kissed her. Felt her tongue shove into his mouth. They slipped together, grazed, teased and coiled and the first suction snapped at him. Sent his hands lower, lower, pitching along Une's ass and then to her thighs.

She'd grown softer than the soldier she'd been. That didn't mean _soft_. She was slender, muscular, a faint springy kiss of feminine fat on hard shapes. Squeezed until her jaw shuddered open, until she leaned back for him. Split apart her legs and his jeans were already coming off, kicked away with his socks. His shirt shed.

Une's long fingers wound over those craggy shapes. Mountainous shoulders and thick biceps and his chest's brawny square heft. A sharply chiseled abdomen. Plunging down. And down. She clawed. Ripped. Dragged ragged raw streaks down a back that felt like tearing at a carved cinder block. She'd already learned everything about him. Every inch over the years they'd hurled themselves at each other like this.

Lips wound around his ear; worried at it with a wet manic suction. Nipped. Nails shredded his skin. It was incriminating. She knew it; he knew it. And said nothing. Pulled at the swollen flesh between his thighs. Urged it closer. There was something complete in it. Une had been with women before. More women than men, really. And there was never _this_. Never the zero-sum quality in it. Something given and something taken.

Women were peaceful. Were peace. You didn't _take_ . Both of them gave. She took. He gave. The head hit lips that'd grown puffy and ravenous. She hated her body at these moments. The sensation she'd only felt with _him_ in her fantasies' inferno. When her hands would wind down her own body, when they'd become his. Gloved or absolutely bare; cool with fabric or scalding and exposed.

Reverential.

_My, Lady, you really **are** quite the regal warrior, aren't you? And this rose..._

She was still a little girl in those fantasies. She was sixteen when they'd met. He'd never touched her. Brushed a rose over her cheek and bathed her in its perfume and smiled. He smiled.

Heero didn't smile. Not now. Sweat already dripped over his brow; it misted him in a glistening skein. Her nightgown torn open even more. Dragged over her head. In her fantasies, she was never really naked with... With him. Always lingerie's elegances. Heels and stockings and something irreproachably feminine.

And now she rutted with a man who was no longer a boy, whose death was her order; his and his allies that were now hers. Now confederates in dreaming impossible dreams. His fingers took hold of her thighs, heaved them even further apart while he stabbed that thick and blunt head against her body. Against those lips that'd grown greasy with a hunger she didn't even _want_ to feel with him.

She did. It was Pavlovian now. A tremor between her legs at a glance. He felt it, too. Twitching whenever his eyes caught her glasses' glint, or her hair's hue that was somehow profoundly different than any other brunette's, even while it was totally like any other woman's. The shapes he'd stamped into indelible knowledge. He could navigate her body with muscle memory. He did.

Kissed her again and again and again. Nails on his shoulders slalomed to the small of his back. Felt the muscle twitch, the thick layered strength. He filled her in an instant. There was no delicate progression, no gentle teases. Shouldered aside clinging walls and tore through the clenching coils that worked with perfect paradox, so tight they were almost trying to ward him away, and still kneading him, urging him deeper.

Hips collided with a wet splatter. It sounded like blood. Her first time was filled with it. She hated it. Not like she hated this. She hated _this_ in its perfection; that he'd learned every inch, every morsel. Arching his body to grind himself at that spot that sent pointillist smears of ruby flaring through her cheeks, twisted itself into her every muscle and drew them taut like breaking a marionette with its strings. Blasted a bubble of scarlet behind her eyelids.

She growled, groaned, mewled, whimpered. Tore at his body. She'd always wanted to feel, naturally and candidly, _his_ name on her lips. But it would never come. This man who was no longer a boy, he couldn't just be a cipher; couldn't be a machine to fill her, a faceless drone to superimpose a face on. She wanted it more than anything.

But Heero's face filled her eyes. Hers filled his. Her hair swept around her body; sweat beads boiled on his brow, spattered in breaking crystal drops across her cheek, her forehead. Her own body ran brilliant with it. Ankles hooked around the small of his back; hands on his shoulders. A quickening cadence. A wet slapping symphonic.

Kissing him. Kissing _Heero_ , because that was who it was. Loathing every drop of her blood that he filled. Pushing the venom out into him and knowing that he was as poisoned as she was. She felt orgasm's hard crack against her brain again, and again, and again.

And then his. Flaring up and grinding that crude head through her; a flesh-charring plume that only hastened everything, only stamped her every twitch and convulsion with a new urgency. A frisson of the forbidden in it. She was sterile. She'd never told him; he never asked.

Maybe it was an unspoken wish. A last act of defiance that could never even be. Her snarls became roars. Her faint little nibbles became sincere flesh-tearing _bites_. Gnashed at him. Hot juices dripped from that delta, trailed down her ass' round shapes.

They didn't stop. She knew they wouldn't be. The second his knee hit the bedding, she knew there would be no hope. Twisting arms around her waist; shoving her down onto the mattress. It was rough, pitiless. More like a rape than anything. Tasting her hips, her thighs. Piercing her skin. Gorging himself on her every yelp and yip and screech.

_Enough. I'm done; I'm done._

It'd been hours, anyway. She was turned away from him again while he lay on his belly, peering at her. Almost a childish posture, chin planted on arms like tawny clay kneaded into stout ropes and bound patiently together and then detailed by a sculptor that thought big and with a love for fire hose veins and bestial hands that were conceived to strangle, to break bones.

Hers was something from statuary, also. Or a portrait. Her weight set on her right thigh and hip, legs thrown out to her left, bent over the bed stand and perfectly silent while she prayed. She always prayed after they fucked like this.

Not to God.

To something that meant more to her than any god ever could.

_I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I love you more than anyone and anything else. I'm so sorry. I love **you**. I love **you**._

Heero stared at her. This was the place where their animal empathy parted company. It was what told him he wasn't as cold as he'd wanted to be. Because he loved his wife, also. He wondered if he even had when they'd first been married. If it had been obligation; if it had been serving as a glorified bodyguard. But every accumulated moment together had stained his soul, had begun to embroider her into him.

Their home together; its furnishings. Even plates that had grown old with them in the time they were together. He would have hucked them out without even a shrug before. Now, there was a pang of something profound lost when one broke. When his thoughts drifted to what it meant to be without her, he hit one of those mines; purified anguish. The thought, _Well, I'd have so much time without her._ And then the epiphany that there wouldn't be any meaning at all in the time.

He'd even begun slowly craning toward that perverse and selfish whim. Maybe they _should_ have children together. Maybe they should fill their home with more voices, more rancor; two-in-the-morning feedings.

Even something as simple as thoughts about a television show took on a unique cast when his mind was there. But he'd never lost her. He could very easily lose her. He wasn't here with Relena's dispensation; there wasn't some unique pass or waiver so he could be an animal with Une. Worse than anything, she'd forgive him. She might return the ring, might tuck it back into his hand; she might very well hammer her palm across his cheek and scream at him. But she'd forgive him. Because she was magnanimous. Because she was nothing like them.

“I love you. I love you. Treize, I love you so much.” Une had taken hold of the frame, cradled it in her sweat-painted fingers. Brushed one over the portrait. It was a photo Heero had never seen anywhere else. Une wasn't nuts; or at least, she wasn't nuts for her belief that there _was_ something in their lives together.

She _had_ heard him, entombed in her own body, in that incubator. His affections. Tears flattened themselves over the glass. He was so beautiful to her. He'd _always_ be that beautiful, even while she grew older; even while she grew old. Even while her skin sagged and her voice grew weak and her mind became feeble and she forgot her own name, he would still be that beautiful.

“It isn't fair, Heero.” Heero had grown accustomed to the recriminations. Even her fist on his jaw. And hers wasn't a slack limp-wristed slug. But she didn't hit him. Didn't even turn. “It isn't fair.”

“That he's gone?” Heero almost winced at the pitiful circumlocution in it. The _tact_. Gone. Not dead. Not a fistful of dust flung through the endless sea of stars.

“That. Of course. But not only that. It's how... How people leave us. How they stitch themselves into our hearts. Even I have a heart. They become a part of us. And they then die. And they don't have the decency to unlace themselves. They don't have the kindness to cut their ties and _then_ go.

“They rip out your soul with them. You're empty. He was my only friend; the only person I ever really loved. The only one who ever really trusted me. And the only one who trusted me enough to berate me. To tell me I was wrong. That I was shameful and disappointing.” Une's palm enfolded his face, so small in the photograph, standing in the middle ground in a haze of rich fuchsia blossoms. Beloved roses. “He trusted me enough to tell me that. He told me he loved me, you know. Once. When he thought I was asleep. We never even kissed. We never made love. He never really even touched me.

“And then he left and he died. It's so simple, isn't it?” Lissome shoulders quivered with what he thought was tears before it occurred to him that she was laughing. Laughing a hideous brutal laugh that was precious broken crystal shaken in its box. “He left! He got to leave, Heero! He got to leave and I got... I got memories. I got _what-if_ s. I got a daughter I can't raise with her father. I got- I got this picture.

“I got perfectly framed memories of the most beautiful man in the world, the most idealistic, the most profound and glorious. The most haunted by guilt and the strongest. And they're all fake. There's a drift to them. Sometimes I wonder if what I remember even happened. And when I'll start to get older, and my mind goes, then it won't make any difference.

“They leave us with nothing but a hollow burning ghost, Heero. They force the onus on _us_. The living take charge of the dead. The living are responsible for the dead in a way that isn't fair. We keep their memories alive. We decide the last redaction. What they were to _us_. They leave us with the guilt. About words unsaid. Or things that should never have been said.

“Most of all, they just leave. Everything becomes past-tense. I think about what I should tell Marie about her father. I don't know. What do I say to her? How can I convey to her _who_ he was without talking about _what_ he was? He was a warrior. A gallant anachronism. She'll think he's a monster. He instigated wars for the beauty and the ugliness in it.

“I fought for him because I believed in him. I wish I could see his face when we fuck, Heero. That it could change what _we_ do into lovemaking. It can't; it doesn't. I hate you, Heero. But I understand you so well. And you understand me. I hate...

“I hate your wife. I hate everything she represents. The hope and the redemption in it. _She_ gave up her grief and she embraced me, took me into her arms one evening and smoothed her hands on my back and she said, I'll never forget how you took my father away from me, but I forgive you, Colonel. And I love you for everything you can be. For everything you've done for Marie. I love you for what you _can_ be now in the future.” Une laughed again; laughed that ugly sincere laugh. “Your wife never understood, Hero.

“She never understood what it meant to fight. You do.” Heero did. It was finding the self-annihilation, the total thoughtlessness in the groove between prosaic life and death's darkness. There was so much light in it. There was so much frenzy; so much intensity; there was so much _purpose_.

Everything had its weight, and then everything was lighter than a feather. A fistful of broken jade. A thousand cherry petals scattered to the wind.

“I hate her for that kindness. For seeing potential in me. I'm not even middle-aged, and I feel like I'm already ready for my funeral. She thinks the simple existence of time means the possibility of change. That because there's so much of the canvas unpainted there's a need and a chance to fill it.”

He said nothing at all. There was nothing to say.

She picked up her glasses. She hadn't worn _those_ for years. And years. At least, never with anyone else. There were moments when she'd set them on her nose's bridge, when she'd bind up her hair. When she'd ease into her uniform and, even with the imperfections, fleshier where there had once been hard flat muscle, she was still what she had been for him.

She would stare at herself in the mirror at attention. And he would come to her. Her name was a brutal irony. She wasn't only one soul. Split images met her and everyone else. Only he ever saw a unity of one woman.

“Lady-”

“Are you afraid now?” Heero legitimately was. When she turned, her eyes cold and flat. When her fingers quickly worked her hair, even damp with their sweat, with spittle from their kisses, into a mussed likeness of her buns.

“Yes.”

“Afraid of what? That I'll kill you, Heero? Finish an assignment I was given years ago? I'm weaker now.” But she did have a pistol. Languidly pulled open her bed stand and fished it out. It was clammy against her palms. Reeked of oil. Battered scuffed metal, the bluing worn away. Bites had been taken from it. Even the grip was chipped.

It had killed countless men and women. Children. It wasn't from her dress uniform. Wasn't her issue weapon. She'd worn it as a soldier, and not only an officer.

“No.”

“Afraid I'll do this?” Smoothly, with a perfect Prussian economy of effort, the barrel snapped away from Heero's face and planted itself against her temple. The smile was one he'd seen more than a decade ago. It was a smile that said she was equipped to do anything, and would do anything. Maybe only _because_.

“I don't know.” Did that mean _yes_?

And then she just tossed it back into its drawer with a hard wood-gouging crack. Peeled off her glasses and set them there beside it; ripped the ribbons from her hair and felt it rush back down her naked skin. And sobbed. Palms on her face, convulsing with the knowledge that she was afraid.

She was _afraid_. Afraid to die. Afraid to leave Marie. To leave the pathetic niche she'd carved for herself in this meaningless life. More than anything, she was afraid that what her father had told her, what the old man had told Heero when he was a boy, was true.

She sobbed because she'd already written the speech she'd need to give at the memorial. She sobbed because she'd been writing that speech every day for more than ten years. She sobbed because they were there, marching on ahead of her, banners furled and shoulders sagging and feet flat and crunching in the dust, exhausted. But they had thrown off their rifles, their swords, their clubs; they were unburdened.

At their ranks' head was a man who wouldn't look back. Just _one_ glance would be enough. She had the dream so many times it should have lost its meaning. It hadn't. He didn't look back at her, no matter how loud she screamed.

She was a hypocrite. What did one man mean in a forest of coffins, in gardens of gallows, in oceans of blood?

She had a dream once where he came to her. He smiled. They laughed. They kissed. He held her, wound his arms around her, and she still knew it would end. They were together on a seashore, and the sun had begun to set. Mauve clouds burned over the horizon, and the light came prismatic and oppressive.

He slipped away from her suddenly, melting behind a dying hot orange glow. She asked him very simply. Do you need to go? Do you really need to go? He laughed and pointed off somewhere in the distance she couldn't see.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't traditionally write notes, but there's a strange poignancy in this for me. Gundam Wing was not only my introduction to anime and Japanese culture: It was my first exposure to fanfiction as a phenomenon, and arguably writing more broadly. Some of the most entertaining works I've read are those consecrated to taking liberties with others' characters. Even now, having committed countless years to honing my own art, there was still a sense of neglect in having never written anything for Gundam.
> 
> So I've corrected that. Belatedly. After almost seven years writing fanfiction, and more still as a writer. I'm just delighted that there's still a vital fanfiction community for Gundam Wing. Also, I can claim the distinction of having written what is- from what I've seen- the only piece with the franchise's most obvious pairing, Heero and Lady Une. They're perfectly and irresistibly poisonous for one another.


End file.
